Threshold coupling strength for equilibration between small systems

Abstract

In this paper we study the thermal equilibration of small bipartite Bose-Hubbard systems, both quantum mechanically and in mean-field approximation. In particular we consider small systems composed of a single-mode "thermometer" coupled to a three-mode "bath", with no additional environment acting on the four-mode system, and test the hypothesis that the thermometer will thermalize if and only if the bath is chaotic. We find that chaos in the bath alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for equilibration in these isolated four-mode systems. The two subsystems can thermalize if the combined system is chaotic even when neither subsystem is chaotic in isolation, and under full quantum dynamics there is a minimum coupling strength between the thermometer and the bath below which the system does not thermalize even if the bath itself is chaotic. We show that the quantum coupling threshold scales like $1/N$ (where $N$ is the total particle number), so that the classical results are obtained in the limit $N\to \infty$.

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